Chapter Thirty-Eight
India’s tried to meditate back down on the beach but she simply can’t.
Her mind is buzzing, so she’s put her headphones on and is listening to Lana Del Rey singing about heartbreak.
Emptying her mind is impossible. Eventually, she gets up from her seated position and begins to collect pretty stones and shells.
All the while, her inner voice is shouting at her: You idiot, you should never have slept with Dan. He doesn’t care for you, he’s shown that. He rang his girlfriend to confess. He was ashamed, yes ashamed.
She goes back to her room without checking in reception to see if Dan has shown up.
It’s not her business any more.
She doesn’t hate him. But she hates how he’s made her feel.
In her room, she examines the notebook Rose left
for them.
India hadn’t written anything in it at first.
India sits, opens Rose’s notebook and breathes deeply.
She doesn’t want to write anything new, which is startling.
She’s written down stuff for years and never took stock of any of it.
All the guys, and the plans she made for the same guys, and it transpires that she never realised what she was doing.
She was building castles in the sky without any foundation.
Crying about not having a child but then doing nothing about it. Why not? She doesn’t actually need a man in order to have a child.
She could use a fertility clinic, get donor sperm.
Without thinking, she finds she’s drawn a very childish version of a sperm swimming with its little wiggly tail.
She gets out her stickers and puts little stars and rainbows beside it.
Imagines herself pregnant, pregnant on her own and fully, joyfully in charge of her own life.
India stops doodling and thinks about this.
First, she’d need a proper job.
What is she good at?
Clothes. That’s what.
Rose said that India’s clothes are art, that she dresses with artistry.
That’s what she’s good at.
But how to monetise it?
How to move on with her life, without relying on a man …
Georgie, hello! How are you, darling? And Dad? The retreat’s been interesting! I’ve met some amazing people and a fabulous new friend, Keera.
I’m messaging because I want your advice. Business advice.
I’d like to start a business selling vintage clothes. I know, everyone and their lawyer does it and I don’t want this to be a nepo-thing where you and Dad set me up and help if I lose money. No! Definitely not! But I’m good at buying stuff and selling it on. What I was thinking of was …
India pauses. If she says this, it’s out there. There’s no turning back.
… going to college to do a one- or two-year business course. Is that a good plan?
Love you, see you soon!! xxx
The previous night, Rose had dreamed about The Talisman Effect: how it started and how everything went slowly wrong.
She finds scent incredibly redolent and, now, a trio of scents floods her senses.
The grapefruit stuff that the hair stylist used every day before filming and that lingered in her hair when she went over to Theo’s house, the scent of whatever he was cooking, the rough tang of the sea when they walked on the beach after dinner.
‘You can’t practise proper therapy but you can teach people something,’ said Theo when the TV show was first mooted after six months of Rose appearing on the breakfast show.
‘Just be careful, Rose. We treat enough people in the movie and TV business: it can be a very cruel world. The producers of your show want great TV and don’t care about great therapy. ’
‘I know,’ said Rose.
But she hadn’t really known.
The TV show meant she had to rapidly break out of the sort of formal therapy that Theo still practised and into the area of a quick-fix approach.
The Talisman Effect had quickly become huge and the producers wanted more excitement, more arguments on the show. Chaos, suffering, fights on live TV.
The TV sites were jammed with news about crazy people from the show – like the woman who fell for her daughter’s teenage husband, which was a huge draw on the tabloid sites.
As the show grew bigger, Rose was scared that her own backstory would come out, but she found that her role as the calm therapist meant media outlets focused on her wisdom rather than trawling her background.
Inevitably, ratings overcame the requirement of actual therapy or the questions of morality about who they had on the show.
Other therapists openly dissed her for her approach, angry at how Rose had made a business out of ‘people’s pain’.
All of it stung Rose. She knew what was happening and yet she felt stuck on the juggernaut of a successful show.
Rose treating the weirder guests upset her beloved Theo, still steadily by her side but unhappy about the way the show had gone.
‘Someone is going to get hurt, Rose, and you’ve got to pull back. Nobody gets the help they need in an hour-long show and it’s going to backfire. The guests are getting closer to the edge where nobody’s going to be able to help them.’
‘I do my best!’ Rose protested. ‘Doesn’t everyone deserve mental health help?’
‘Yes, but some of the people on the show need psychiatric help before they can benefit from therapy! You know this, Rose. Please, get off the merry-go-round. You’re better than this.’
That comment had hurt most of all.
Better than a TV show that was watched by millions and did try to help troubled people?
‘How can you say that?’ she hurled back at him. ‘Am I too low-rent for you?’
That night, he came home very late and slept in the spare bedroom.
Rose felt the arctic blast of being dismissed.
The next day, she moved out of his house and into a hotel. She thought it was just for some breathing space. But when the pops of the gun were heard two weeks later on The Talisman Effect, Rose was alone.
In the midst of the fear and chaos, she had no beloved Theo to hold her in the maelstrom.
TV Guru Silent on Traumatic Live-Show Shooting.
Who’s Gonna Fix It Now Rose Has Fled?
What Can TV Experts Learn from The Talisman Effect’s Crash and Burn?
New Therapist Steps into Rose’s Shoes – She’s Young and She’s Hot!
That was the history of her show in four headlines.
The news outlets didn’t know about the producers’ anger at Rose for leaving, their desire for someone to carry the can, her agent’s many attempts to coax Rose back to LA.
‘If you go, your TV career will be over,’ her agent said in a message that Rose deleted instantly.
She didn’t want a TV career any more.
As she hadn’t witnessed the on-set shooting, she didn’t need to hang around once her original statement had been taken.
There was no point showing the world the emails she’d sent to the producers after she and Theo had split.
‘We need to rethink the show,’ she’d written. ‘It is becoming dangerous to guests’ psychological well-being to create so much tension on set. We are risking lives here. As a professional, I will have to step away from the show if we cannot address these issues.’
Within a few days of the shooting, Rose Talisman was in the wind, leaving the home she’d shared with Theo, and her life, behind.
Rose stops pacing and tries to fix her hair in one of Adriana’s big mirrors. Her hair has come down out of its knot and she didn’t wash it today, so it’s flyaway, needs taming.
Standing still for a moment in front of the mirror, a coil of hair in one hand, she realises something: she can’t sit in front of her laptop and phone in here and wait for news, wait for everything to come crashing down around her.
That was what happened with the show. She waited when she should have acted. She relied on others to change the format.
Villa Artemis is the beloved home she’s made with Adriana and Christos, her brave venture back into running a therapy retreat. Nobody else can fix this except Rose. She has to fight back and she needs some quiet time to figure out what to do.
Five minutes in the kitchen with the coffee machine gives her a steaming, double-strength coffee. Rose grabs one of Adriana’s hats, jams it on her head and slips out a side door then goes onto the terrace.
There’s lots of noise coming from the bar.
Peering around the corner and hidden from sight by vast shrubs and a curled olive tree in a pot, she sees Julia drinking with Alexei and Stavros. All previous animosity seems to have disappeared.
Rose avoids being seen by taking the rocky back steps down to the gardens and descends into the bower that is her hidden Greek garden.
Rose needs to think clearly away from the hectic energy of the others if she is to save her beloved retreat. She knows it doesn’t take her long. She just needs to be able to go within.
She’d never been even vaguely interested in gardening before but, when the remains of the original stone house were being excavated, Rose decided to create a peaceful green area where guests could relax, surrounded by the scents of Corfu.
Christos had said he didn’t know what would grow there, when she showed him her sketch of this garden, an oblong surrounded by terraced flowerbeds and with local sculptures dotted around.
‘I know nothing about plants,’ he said, shrugging, ‘but this area will be dry. We won’t have any money left over from landscaping the rest of the villa. We are eco-friendly with all that watering, but here?’ He shrugged again. ‘We can’t afford to add it to the irrigation system.’
Rose had thought it was unlikely that the Ancient Greeks, who’d achieved such mathematical, philosophical and architectural brilliance, didn’t have a plan for watering gardens that didn’t involve linking it to the villa’s clever use of grey water to keep the plants watered.
She researched and found that ollas were the key: terracotta cylinders planted in the garden, they were filled with water which slowly seeped out into the earth when the nearby shrubs were dry and needed it.
Dotted all over this now flourishing garden are countless simple, terracotta ollas which are carefully monitored by Stavros. Thanks to the watering system of the ancients, there are flourishing waves of lady’s mantle which has grown like wildfire.
There’s bushy catmint and lavender, both wafting fabulous scents into the air, and currently a magnet for clusters of happy bees. Low-lying sedums and leggy agapanthus grow side by side, and little clumps of sea holly and rosemary dot the raised rockery that Stavros was working on last week.
Rose finds the little stone bench at the bottom of the garden where their property is bordered by another one. The goat who lives in the next-door field has seen Rose arrive and has bustled over in the hope of something to eat.
He peers over his fence at the seated woman. His name is Elvis, according to Stavros.
‘I’ve nothing for you, Elvis,’ Rose tells him. ‘Not a thing.’
If goats could pout, Rose knows Elvis is pouting. He fully expects all visitors to the garden to bring him treats.
He paws sullenly at the earth a bit, then goes back to staring out to sea.
Rose stares too.
Below her is the curving road to Xanthe and the small path to the Kri Kri beach where she’s had so many successful sessions with her retreaters. A single boat is in the distance, sails high in search of a breeze which Rose feels is unlikely today.
She keeps watching it but it appears the boat is becalmed: no wind to puff her sails.
Like us, Rose thinks.
Becalmed.
She doesn’t want to fail in this beautiful place.
She doesn’t know if she has it in her to start her life all over again.
Corfu is magical. If Villa Artemis fails, she knows that her sister and Christos can move into his mother’s house until they get back on their feet.
Rose could live there too but she doesn’t want to.
She thinks she’d never get over the failure.
Bored, Elvis is now banging his head against his fence for attention and, as she looks at him, her eyes catch a few single shoots of clover in the soil.
The watering of her ollas has made snippets of grass grow too, so she gets up and picks the clover’s fluffy purple heads as well as a few blades of grass for her companion.
‘No biting,’ Rose warns, holding the clover out as if feeding a horse, with her hand flat.
The goat delicately nibbles at her flat palm and Rose can’t help but smile at the sensation of his soft muzzle.
She loves animals. And then she thinks in a rush of lovely Biscuit, with a warm canine heart and the most loving eyes. What happened with Biscuit was what started the whole series of lies.